


The Way Faith Dies

by Silvermags



Category: Chronicles of Narnia - C. S. Lewis
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, Canon Compliant, Gen, Not A Fix-It, One Shot, Sad, The Problem of Susan, The Tragedy of Susan, except not really, it's about faith, it's not all about nylons and lipstick, the so-called
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-31
Updated: 2020-01-31
Packaged: 2021-02-25 16:02:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 698
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22498771
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Silvermags/pseuds/Silvermags
Summary: You don't lose faith.  It dies for lack of care.
Kudos: 22





	The Way Faith Dies

  
This is the way that faith dies.

  
It starts slow, and secret. Susan, that school year after Caspian, staring up at the ceiling of her dorms in the dark and vows and vows she won’t ever forget a single thing about Narnia, about her once-kingdom. The girl in the next bed over hits her with a pillow and tells her to stop muttering and go to sleep.

  
She makes friends, and there’s nothing wrong with that, so did Peter and Edmund and Lucy, but their friends were the kind who admired the throneless monarch’s imagination, who wished that trees really spoke, who were thoughtful, and respectful, and couldn’t help but half believe them when they told their stories. Susan’s friends rolled their eyes and asked if she wasn’t much too old for such silly games.

  
Susan stops telling stories to her friends. To her siblings, she dances their old dances, sings their old songs, reminisces and dreams and believes. But away from her siblings, she is silent.

  
Susan goes to America, while she is gone, Lucy and Edmund are afforded one last chance to see the land they all fought and bled for, the world that felt more their own than the one that birthed them, and then the door was closed to them, too. They, and Peter, mourn and move on. Susan stews, and becomes bitter.

  
Susan stops talking quite so much with her siblings and instead goes out with her skeptical, realistic, oh so mature friends, into the “real world”. Slowly at first, but faster and faster, she falls into their fashion, their music and parties, their myopic view of the world, their priorities. Her life becomes a blur of lights and faces and smoke. 

  
Peter and Edmund and Lucy worry for their sister, who is in and out of their lives like a hummingbird, there one minute and gone the next, all flash and glamor and no substance to her smile or light to her eyes. They try to talk to her, but the first time one of them so much as obliquely references Narnia and Aslan in earshot of Susan’s guests, they’re laughed out with a few sharp words about babyishness. The next time, there are no guests, and Susan repeats back what she’s told her friends and herself a thousand times.

  
“This is the way the real world is” everyone around them says, “There is no magic, no greater power, nothing to have faith in. Why waste your time looking for and holding onto such childish notions when you can join adulthood?” Peter and Edmund and Lucy, Magnificent and Just and Valiant, held to their values and didn’t listen. Susan left her gentleness behind and did.

  
I’ve always wondered why everyone is so up in arms about the line talking about Susan’s lipsticks and nylons, and ignored the next one, fretted over the symptoms and ignored the cause. All Susan wanted was to rush on to the silliest time of her life as quickly as she could and stop there for as long as she could. And she wanted that because she had allowed the world to convince her that nothing else was real. The world told her that nothing was real, nothing was important, not hope, not love, not the throne she held for decades or the faith of her childhood and her siblings. And Susan let herself be convinced.

  
There’s nothing wrong with nylons and lipsticks and parties. There’s something very wrong with letting them be your whole life, especially when you neglect what’s really important, and you don’t even realize until it’s gone.

  
Whether Susan let her faith come back to life as she stood over the graves of all her family, or whether she grew ever more bitter and jaded, I can’t say I know. But whether she ever let herself believe again or not, the difference between her and her siblings was this: All of them were left in a world not truly their own anymore, only their own faith, and memories, and stubbornness to protect them from the darkness that wanted to drown them. Peter and Edmund and Lucy held their shields strong. Susan let hers drop.


End file.
